ORG:Not according to Hoyle  by John W. Oller, Jr., Ph.D.*

   Impact article #138, December 1984 (Published by the Institute for
Creation Research) (c) 1984

   No, not poker, and not Edmond Hoyle (1672-1769), the famed authority
on card games and chess. Darwinism is the game and Sir Fred Hoyle
(1915-present), the distinguished astronomer, is the odds maker. He
says, no. Just plain no. It couldn't happen without intelligence. His
reasoning slams like a steel door against _any_ kind of accidental
evolution, and several have recently proposed in one form or another to
plug the holes in neo-Darwinism--especially the gaps in the fossil
record.

   Now that evolutionists admit openly that the fossil record never did
support the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy after all, they need a substitute.
Stephen Jay Gould has proposed reviving the despised view of
Goldschmidt who believed in "hopeful monsters," the idea that something
like a dog, say, might just hatch from, say a chicken's egg once in a
great while. Another idea, a less popular one, is Jean Piaget's
recommendation to reinstate the long rejected Lamarckism--the view that
learned or acquired traits might be passed on from one generation to
the next. And still another is Hoyle's own proposal, a remarkable
mutation of neo-Darwinism.

   In his well-illustrated and impressive book, "The Intelligent
Universe" (London: Michael Joseph, 1983, 256 pp), Hoyle says:

   "...as biochemists discover more and more about the awesome
complexity of life, it is apparent that it's chances of originating by
accident are so minute that they can be completely ruled out. Life
cannot have risen by chance (pp.11-12).

   Does this mean that Hoyle has become a creationist? Well, not
exactly, and he doesn't expect to either. To forestall any speculation
about his apparent "conversion," he says bluntly: "I am not a
Christian, nor am I likely to become one as far as I can tell (p.
251)." Still, Hoyle argues that there must have been some
"intelligence" behind the emergence of life on Earth. Setting aside the
questions of what sort of intelligence, he offers an interesting line
of argument.

   The probability that the simplest life-form could just accidentally
arrange itself from particles floating in an ideally prepared
primordial soup is very slim. To appreciate just how slim, Hoyle
proposes an analogy. He asks how long it would take a blindfolded
person to solve a Rubik Cube. Suppose he worked very fast; say, a move
a second without resting. According to Hoyle's figuring it would take
approximately 67.5 times the estimated age of the universe (allowing
the generous figure of 15 billion years since the big bang), for him to
reach a solution--about 1.35 trillion years. Judging from the life
expectancy of human beings we could say that a solution of the Rubik
Cube could not be achieved at all by a blindfolded person. Yet this is
just about the same difficulty as the accidental formation of just one
of the chains of the amino acids necessary to living cells. In the
human cell, Hoyle points out, there are about 200,000 such proteins.
The chance of getting all 200,000 by accident is really small. In fact,
even if an ideal primordial soup existed, and if it were repeatedly
jolted by electrical charges (as in the famous Miller-Ulrey
experiment), the time required for the formation of any one of the
requisite 200,000 proteins would be roughly equivalent to 293.5 times
the estimated age of the Earth (set at the standard 4.6 billion years).

   Yet the odds against the accidental formation of a living organism
are considerably worse than the odds against a blindfolded solution of
the Rubik Cube--the later being estimated by Hoyle to be about 50
billion trillion to 1. The trouble is that even a simple protozoan, or
a bacterium, requires the prior formation of about 2,000 enzymes,
themselves also complex proteins, which are critical to the successful
formation of all the other 198,000 or so requisite proteins. The odds
in favor of the accidental formation of all 2000 by accident (never
mind the 198,000), without which no living organism could have come
into existence, approaches a truly infinitesimal magnitude. The odds
would be similar to those 2000 blindfolded persons working Rubik Cubes
independently and just accidentally coming to perfect solutions
simultaneously--according to Hoyle, roughly 10^400000 to 1. Or, to give
a more graspable notion of the improbability, Hoyle says, it would be
roughly comparable to rolling double-sixes 50,000 times in a row with
unloaded dice. Looking at it from the point of view from the expected
time lapse before reaching a solution, the predicted heat death of our
solar system would have occurred early on, and our Milky way galaxy
would have rolled itself up like a scroll long before a solution could
be hoped for.

   In the next phase of his argument, the British scholar gets down to
bare knuckles. He says that anyone foolish enough to believe that the
solution to the life-problem might just come about by accident is
guilty of "junkyard mentality." The basis for this phrase is another
analogy of Hoyle's own creation. (Unfortunately, it seems to fit his
own proposed solution too, but more about that below). He asked
somewhat earlier, and asks again in his 1983 book, what are the chances
that a tornado might blow through a junkyard containing the parts of a
747 and just accidentally assemble it so as to leave it sitting there
all set for take-off. "So small as to be negligible, " he says, "even
if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole
Universe." (p.19).

   But many evolutionists may not easily be persuaded by the argument
against the junkyard mentality. They may be inclined to believe that
the analogy of a 747 is quite uninteresting since there are conceivably
multiplied billions of possible aircraft designs, not to mention
designs for other vehicles yet to be imagined. That is to say, some
evolutionists might well be inclined to suppose that there are many
billions of possible solutions to the life-problem and that the one
which occurred on Earth was as inevitable as the shape of a totally
unique snowflake. But Hoyle has anticipated their rebuttal and rejects
it. He contends that in the universe as we know it there are
uncountable "anthropic" coincidences--intelligent accidents. For
instance, he cites the approximate balance of oxygen and carbon atoms.
Both are critical to living organisms, and must be present in
approximately equal quantities. Otherwise, "a great excess of carbon
would prevent the formation of many materials on which life is
dependent, rock and soil for example, while a great oxygen excess would
simply burn up any carbon-bearing biochemicals that happened to be
around" (p.218).

   Or, for another lucky coincidence, take the delicate balance inside
the hydrogen atom. Hoyle says:

   If the combined masses of the proton and electron were suddenly to
become a little more rather than a little less than the mass of the
neutron, the effect would be devastating. The hydrogen atom would
become unstable. Throughout the Universe all the hydrogen atom would
immediately break down to form neutrons and neutrinos. Robbed of its
nuclear fuel, the Sun would fade and collapse. Across the whole of
space, stars like the Sun would contract in their billions, releasing a
deadly flood of X-rays as they burned out. By that time life on earth,
needless to say, would already have been extinguished (pp 219-220).

   These peculiar coincidences, the balance of oxygen and carbon and of
particles in the hydrogen atom (not to mention countless others), Hoyle
refers to as "anthropic"--almost human, as if Someone were speaking to
us. He points out that there is no reason to suppose that such
coincidences are inevitable since there is no end of other imaginable
arrangements which would be fatal not only to life but to the very
structure of the universe as we know it.

   Hoyle concludes that it takes a certain credulity to believe that
such coincidences are just so many inevitable accidents. According to
him, life together with the whole universe dangles precariously from an
infinitesimal thread of improbability held by some sort of
intelligence, while beneath yawns a chasm of nearly infinite and fatal
probabilities.

   It is interesting that Hoyle is willing to go along with
neo-Darwinism in its rejection of the miracle of creation, yet he
complains that the model requires miracles of its own:

   ...as for instance the miracle of the formation of galaxies after
the big bang and the miracle of the origin of life in a feeble brew of
organic soup, which the credulous believe to have happened in the early
history of the earth (p. 237).

   So what does Hoyle propose to put in the place of the less and less
plausible neo-Darwinian orthodoxy? Briefly, skipping over many
interesting details of his argument, he suggests that cosmic dust
actually consists of the remains of countless bacteria which now
populate, and have populated for a long time, the whole universe. He
figures that life first originated elsewhere and was transported to
Earth, perhaps in the dust of some wide-ranging comet. But the
"life-seeds" (his term) brought to Earth, by whatever means, were not
accidents in the neo-Darwinian sense, they were sent by some prior, or
perhaps subsequent intelligence which is guiding, pushing and/or
pulling, us into the future. The reason for this ambivalence is that in
Hoyle's system time runs both forward and backward. He can't think of
any mathematical reason why time couldn't run both ways, so he assumes
it does.

   Somehow the life-seeds got safely to Earth, having been sent out in
all directions by a previous and/or subsequent intelligence. He says,
somewhat enigmatically, "we are the intelligence that preceded us" (p.
239). Afterward, neo-Darwinian evolution took over, but with a peculiar
twist. Hoyle believes that the billions and billions of mutations
necessary to the impossibly rapid ascent of protozoans to man were
brought about by viral infections which modified the DNA of parent
organisms. These viruses, he claims, were guided by some "cosmic
intelligence," which eventually thus gave rise to the great variety of
organisms that we see on Earth today. Further, in some yet-to-be
imagined way, intelligent beings, perhaps much smarter than we are, but
not as smart as the infinite Judeo-Christian God (whom Hoyle discards)
planned the whole scenario.

   Having demolished any hope for new-Darwinism, Hoyle alludes to his
own theory unflatteringly:

   Although the thought may seem rather fanciful, the surface of Mars
looks very much like a failed attempt at seeding from space, failed
"experiment" of a kind which eventually succeeded in the case of the
Earth (p. 105).

   He says that "genes"...arrived on the Earth from the outside" (p.
109), but he acknowledges that his idea merely postpones consideration
of the life-problem:

   An explanation of the amazing complexity of life must still
eventually be given, even in a cosmic theory (p. 109).

   Really. And, by the way, if Hoyle's substitute for the discredited
neo-Darwinian orthodoxy seems plausible, I've got an incredible bargain
for you on a used diesel import. Otherwise, in view of the fact that
evolution cannot occur, what is so unscientific about the creation
miracle?


   * Dr. Oller is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New
Mexico.


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   Institute for Creation Research P.O. Box 2667 El Cajon, CA 92021
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